Thursday, April 04, 2013

Awaken from winter slumber, blog!

Arise gentle mountain.

I've been neglecting Briques du Neige the last year or so. I have many excuses and explanations. The big concrete one is that my wife gave birth in October and the child's fierce intelligence and cutting wit suggest that I am indeed the father. So that's been keeping me busy. The vaguer explanation for the lack of prooduction here is perhaps more interesting. It's taken me a while to wrestle with it. It's not really laziness or lack of motivation. It's just that nothing seems special enough any more to merit a blog post (meta aside: is anything ever? Probably not, so point taken and let's just move on). I think what is happening is that after nine years, I have integrated into my life here in Montreal to the point where I have lost that outsider, observer perspective. I am living my life and everything just seems normal. When people from outside Montreal ask me about the corruption scandal going on, I am a bit surprised that they don't already know everything about it. I mean isn't everybody following Monique Muise's awesome twitter feed? The snow is melting and Clark street was not a total garbage fest for once, but that's just spring time and I might as well be talking about the weather. I still don't feel like I am truly from here, but I have never felt like I am truly from anywhere in my life. I think for me this is about as "home" as it gets, when I don't feel like blogging about my city anymore.

That being said, there still is a lot going on here. The gradual evolution of Mile End towards true, awful gentrification marches on relentlessly. The cops in Montreal are demonstrating a culture of fascism and oppression that is rivalling the RCMP. The Charbonneau commission is on fucking fire. And finally, finally, wonderful springtime is here (or was for a couple days, then got skittish and backed off, but now appears to be well and truly here).

So with the buds and the dogshit and the birds living in the power line housing outside our apartment, this blog will also finally poke its head out from the cold and the snow.

Briques du Neige has been pretty focused on Montreal life, culture and politics, with a few diversions here and there. I am going to widen the scope going forward, for the reasons stated above, and hope to share a broader range of my spazzy ramblings and inane observations. There is a much greater potential for angry rants, so be warned.

Why briques du neige?

When I first moved to Montréal, I was obsessed with the quantity of accumulated snow in the winter. I came up with a scheme to design a snow-brick making tool and hire out my services to people where I would turn all the snow in their yard to bricks and then stack it neatly. This enterprise, named briques du neige, would also be an excellent way to learn about and integrate myself into my new community. Unfortunately, before I was able to launch my plan, the Japanese invented Yuki-Taro and made me redundant. So my project morphed itself into this blog, kept the title (including the minor grammatical error which perfectly captures my functional but erroneous french) and the mission to better understand this crazy city and the Quebec culture that is such a crucial and complex part of the Canadian story.

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About Me

1/3 American, 1/3 Canadian, 1/3 Montrealer, when I'm not working for the planet and living my lucky life, I hang out on the internet and write about culture and language in Montreal, books and movies. I also rant on a wide range of subjects and try to do that here so my wife doesn't have to be the only one to suffer.